Timoshenko refuses to undergo medical examination

Timoshenko was head of the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine /UESU/ in 1995-1997

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KHARKOV, June 29 (Itar-Tass) —— Ukraine’s former Prime Minister and leader of the Batkivshchina party Yulia Timoshenko, who is serving a prison term on office abuse charges, has refused to undergo medical examination, Timoshenko’s lawyer Sergei Vlasenko said on Thursday.

“She was approached by people who said they were experts in forensic medicine but Yulia Vladimirovna [Timoshenko] did not let them to examine her,” he said.

On June 25, public prosecutor Viktor Lobach, who takes part in the trial on a tax evasion case against Timoshenko as the executive of Ukraine’s Unified Energy Systems corporation, asked the court to appoint a medical examination of Timoshenko because of "the former premier’s systematic failure to attend the hearings for health reasons.”

Prior to the trial, Timoshenko wrote a statement refusing to attend. She referred to the conclusions by German Professor Karl Marx Einhopl, who had examined her. It was Timoshenko’s fifth statement in which she refused to attend the hearings of her case and the review of her appeal.

Timoshenko was head of the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine /UESU/ in 1995-1997.

On April 19, prosecutors said Timoshenko was accused under the new case of masterminding the theft of budget funds, attempted theft of 25 million hrivnas /more than 3 million U.S. dollars/, 4-million-hrivna /500,000 U.S. dollars/ tax evasion, and using a credit card of a foreign company to pay almost one million U.S. dollar worth of bills at expensive hotels and restaurants without reporting the sum to the tax authorities.

According to the indictment, Timoshenko, as president of the UESU private company, planned and carried through a scheme to imitate transfers through the Golden Union Offshore Bank on Cyprus and the Yuzhkombank she controlled. The scheme involved two companies subordinate to Timoshenko: Somolli Enterprises Limited and Corlan Enterprises Limited; they, too, were used to imitate fund transfers.

The accomplices to this crime are her farther in law Gennady Timoshenko who died last May. He was UESU director general. The other accomplice is the former chief accountant of this company who was a deputy director general.

She is now being treated at a Kharkov hospital. Her illness aggravated at the Kachanovskya penitentiary where she is serving a seven-year prison term for acting in excess of her office duties when singing gas contracts with Russia in 2009.